Information Resources

Technical References

Current Topics

Directory

Minnesota
Ground-Water Information Guide

- Emphasizing Internet-Available Information -

by Tim Thurnblad
Minnesota Pollution Control Agency
July 2005

Welcome
Welcome to the home page for the Minnesota Ground-Water Information Guide. This is still the permanent access point for all components of the guide. Bookmark this "home" page, not the documents to which it links. This will ensure that you see important notices and have access to the most current version of the guide. This page was designed to provide you with background information and a brief orientation. Important! It is highly recommended that you download and install the most recent version of the free Adobe Reader® software and review "Navigating the Guide" (below) before you visit any of the guide components.

About the Guide
What's New? The guide now includes four components compared to a single component in the 2003 version. Each component is designed to meet a different set of site-visitor needs. This home page is the common access point for all four components of the guide so it continues to provide a "one-stop-shopping" interface for Minnesota Ground-Water Information. The appearance of the home page has been refined to improve readability and the Main Menu has been streamlined.

Purpose. The purpose of this guide is to make it easier for you to find Minnesota ground-water information and expertise including ground-water data, maps, reports, government programs, regulations, recommended methodologies and more. Previously, there was no central access point for these resources. This project attempts to provide a user-friendly Internet gateway, or portal, to the information and expertise.

How the Guide Can Help You. Responsibilities for Minnesota ground water reside with numerous organizations according to laws, practical considerations and other factors. Therefore, ground-water data, maps, reports, project files, regulatory contacts and technical experts are distributed among numerous organizations. This can pose a challenge for people seeking ground-water information or expertise. This project endeavors to help Minnesotans by researching, organizing and listing these resources with their web site addresses and telephone numbers so web site visitors will not all have to repeat the work individually.

A Cooperative Effort. The Minnesota Geological Survey (MGS) and the Minnesota Ground Water Association (MGWA) host this guide on their web sites to serve the mutual interests of all those interested in Minnesota ground water. I would like to acknowledge and thank these organizations and especially Sean Hunt of the MGWA and Rich Lively of the MGS for their valuable support on this project. The contributions of all reviewers are also highly appreciated.

About Adobe PDF Documents. This guide includes four components in Adobe® Portable Document Format (PDF). To ensure that you can view the documents properly and use all available features, please make sure that you have downloaded and installed the most recent version of the free Adobe Reader® software. If the text looks blurry on the screen, you may need to adjust the preferences or settings within your Internet browser program or within Adobe Reader®. Please note that individual users can set preferences that result in either using Adobe Reader® to view PDF documents inside their web browser program or to view PDF documents in a separate Adobe Reader® window. Some program features discussed below might behave differently depending on which configuration (preference) and which version of Adobe Reader® you are using. The detailed Adobe Reader® user guide discusses these options, how to address text smoothing and many other issues.

Navigating the Guide - Tips to Save You Time
Pre-publication trials indicated that most users were either unaware of or ignored time-saving navigation tools built into Adobe® PDF documents. Since parts of this guide are very large, these browsing and searching tools can greatly reduce the time required to find topics of interest. This picture illustrates where you can find the navigation tools. The numbered list below corresponds to the red numbers in the picture and explains how to use the tools. Please note: only numbers 2 and 3 apply to the "Directory" component.

1. Click on the Bookmark Tab, if necessary, in the left margin and select a main topic from the list of bookmarks; or click on a "+" sign to access sub-topics. These bookmark links bring you to the correct page but you might need to scroll up or down on the page to find the beginning of your topic.
2. Click on the binoculars (found on a tool bar near the top of the window) to search for a specific word or phrase.
3. Use additional navigation buttons built into Adobe Reader® tool bars near the top of the window (or they might be detached and "floating") and the status bar near the bottom of the window. They allow you to browse BACK (Previous View) and FORWARD (Next View), go to the NEXT or PREVIOUS PAGE, FIRST or LAST PAGE, go to a SPECIFIC PAGE NUMBER, etc. If you don't see these navigation buttons or for more detailed instructions, see the Adobe Reader® user guide.
4. Use the system of blue, underlined hypertext-linked menus and headings that begins in the main menu to quickly take you to key locations within the document.
5. Use the hypertext links in either the "Overview" or "Detailed" version of the Table of Contents.
6. Use the colorful icons ("Favorites") on the bottom-half of the first page in the "information resources" component to quickly access popular parts of the document.

If these options sound confusing, look at this picture again to see exactly where each of these navigation tools are located (inside the guide)

Why Can't I find the Topic I Clicked On? Hypertext links (including bookmarks) with destinations inside a PDF document (internal links) should take you to the correct page, however, depending on your configuration, you may need to scroll up or down on the page to see the topic you seek. Why doesn't the view change when I click on some internal links? It may be because you are already on the correct page; look for your topic as you scroll through the current page.

Why Does the Go Back Arrow Button Take Me to the "Wrong" View? First note that depending on your software configuration, as described in "About Adobe PDF Documents" above, you might have two different sets of forward and backward (back) navigation arrow buttons available to you: 1) web browser program (e.g., Microsoft Internet Explorer) arrow buttons that generally move you between different web pages (e.g., between two documents with different World Wide Web addresses) and 2) PDF document arrow buttons that generally move you within a PDF document. When you use browser arrow buttons to return to a PDF document, your view will either be returned to a) the beginning of the document or to b) the last page you viewed. For this guide, whether your viewing experience will follow pattern 'a' or pattern 'b' apparently depends on your software configuration. Similar (parallel) program behavior is observed when re-opening PDF documents. For some users, updating to Adobe Reader version 6 changed the program's behavior to favor returning to the last page viewed instead of always returning to the first page. However, your experience might be different as there could be other factors involved. Please remember that, in three of the four components to this guide, you need only click on the red "Title Page" bookmark in the left margin to return to the beginning of the document.

Select a Document (Component) to View
This guide includes four components. The newly updated "Information Resources" component is the most comprehensive; it emphasizes regional and statewide information. It features links to hydrogeologic atlases, reports, technical data, maps, bibliographies, ground-water programs and much more. The new "Technical Reference" and "Current Topics" components are more concise; they emphasize concepts and methodologies as opposed to location-specific information. The "Directory" (last updated in September 2003) is essentially an annotated telephone book for Minnesota ground-water programs.

• Information Resources
• Technical Reference List
• Current Topics Web Review
• Directory (organizations and people)

Contacts, Suggestions and Help
Your questions and comments are welcome. If you need assistance, have a suggestion, want to report a bad hypertext link or would otherwise like to contact the author of this guide, you may reach me via the contact information below. I encourage individuals within organizations that have Minnesota ground water information to let me know when your information or links change.

• email: tim.thurnblad@pca.state.mn.us
• Telephone: 651-296-8582

Tim Thurnblad
Minnesota Pollution Control Agency
Environmental Analysis and Outcomes Division
520 Lafayette Road North
St. Paul, MN 55123

The graphics on this page are included courtesy of the Minnesota Geological Survey (MGS) and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR). A special 'thank you' is due to Bob Tipping, Dale Setterholm and Terry Boerboom of the MGS, and Jim Berg and Jan Falteisek of the DNR for their cooperation.